The Ontario election has been a bit of a snooze in many respects, and the polls have remained the same throughout. But underneath that, there are some interesting things going on that need to be unpacked. And why is it that the main opposition parties, the NDP and Liberals, have been so painfully lackluster? Why did they fail to bring their A-game? Today's guest is Hamish Marshall, who worked as Research Director for Angus Reid Public Opinion and is now a Partner at the firm One Persuasion.
00:01:58.720The Ontario election has been a bit of a snooze in many respects.
00:02:13.500There really haven't been many issues that the parties have fiercely battled over.
00:02:17.200And the polls have remained the same throughout, with progressive conservative Doug Ford expected to win re-election, most likely with a majority government.
00:02:24.760But underneath that, there are some interesting things going on that need to be unpacked.
00:02:29.160Ford has managed to bring on the sorts of union endorsements that we used to think of being typically aligned with the NDP.
00:02:36.280Ontario also had some of the strictest and longest lockdowns of the past two years compared to similar jurisdictions.
00:02:41.940How has that changed the way Ontarians think of their relationship to government and therefore vote?
00:02:46.660Oh, and why didn't grassroots conservatives in Ontario at least try to give Ford a hard time or give them the boot over this stuff like they recently did with Alberta Premier Jason Kenney?
00:03:07.440He worked as research director for Angus Reid Public Opinion.
00:03:10.320He's now a partner of the firm One Persuasion, and he's managed a number of political campaigns, including being national campaign manager for the federal conservatives in the 2019 election.
00:03:23.540Yeah, I always hate to tee up something by saying, okay, we're now going to talk about something uneventful.
00:03:29.100But, you know, Seinfeld's show about nothing, it was, I guess, one of the top-rated shows of its time.
00:03:33.380So we can turn around and say there is actually a lot going on here beneath the main plot.
00:03:37.820There's a lot of interesting subplots.
00:03:39.580But before we get into all of those subplots, I mean, what do you make of this fact?
00:03:43.080I'm just kind of surprised after all this, the strong passions and anti-Ford stuff over the past few years from liberals, NDP, and just all the crazy things that have happened in our world in the lives of past two years, that this election has proven to be something of lesser substance than I think a lot of us were expecting.
00:04:34.960And I think a lot of it comes down to really two things.
00:04:39.780One is coming out of the pandemic, a desire for stability for Ontarians, a desire to sort of return to normality, a kind of a feeling of like, let's change everything, let's change government, doesn't really exist.
00:04:54.020I think the pandemic played a big part of that.
00:04:56.120And I think the other big issue is just the complete incompetence of the Liberals and NDP and their inability to capitalize on any anti-Ford feeling out there.
00:05:06.220You know, it's such a good point because I've written columns saying we need inquiries and commissions into the COVID stuff.
00:05:12.920I think it's remarkable that one of the reasons Ontario had such severe lockdowns was our health system is just not what it's been chalked up to be over the past however many years.
00:05:21.820So, you know, we really need to have these conversations.
00:05:23.940But then to your point, people are frustrated.
00:05:27.840There's this great documentary out on them.
00:05:29.500I think it's still up on Netflix or Amazon or whatever.
00:05:31.280And there's a scene where they talk about how their song, Take It Easy, it was their first big hit.
00:05:35.740And it became a hit, I think in part, they said, because there's the Vietnam War, there's all this crazy stuff going on at Watergate, and people just wanted to take it easy.
00:05:44.980Like they didn't actually want to be at each other's throats anymore.
00:07:22.420Is there also something to be said for the fact that maybe the Ford government isn't as conservative and far right and what have you as liberal and NDP voices would like you to believe,
00:07:32.300that they're a relatively centrist party, that they're kind of in line with Ontarians?
00:07:35.760Yeah, I don't, I don't think there's a radical agenda for change.
00:07:39.620This isn't the common sense revolution of 1995, right?
00:07:43.800There's a very much like the message is steady as she goes and you can't have a steady as she goes government that is doing radical things for left or right.
00:07:53.460Like it's just, those things don't fit.
00:07:54.800And they, I think this government really, really understands their value proposition and their lane, which is telling people that we're going to manage things in a competent, perhaps not super exciting way.
00:08:08.960And, and, and by, by not trying to shake it up, that's one of the reasons we're not seeing, you know, big policy hand grenades or trying to do something, you know, like the budget that we had in the spring.
00:08:19.940And it's a perfectly good budget, but it's not, you know, it's not the most exciting Ontario budget of my lifetime.
00:08:25.260And, but that's not, that's, that's, that's not a bug.
00:09:04.060But as I said, I think that, I think the, the Ford government really understands where the mood of, of the voters they have and the voters they need are right now and are delivering that sort of middle of the road government.
00:09:18.440That's not trying, it's not swinging for the fences, but that's okay.
00:09:21.920Like that, that's, that's what people want.
00:09:23.540People don't want overreach right now and they're not getting it.
00:09:26.500Hamish, are a lot of people going to vote on June 2nd?
00:09:29.800Is there going to be strong voter turnout?
00:09:32.920I, I, I think the turnout, voter turnout is going to be lower.
00:09:37.000You know, provincial voter turnout is always generally lower than what we see federally.
00:09:42.000And the most, the best predictor of whether turnout is going to be up or down in an election is whether or not there's strong feeling of time for a change.
00:09:50.160When, when, when, when, when that's true, whether it's conservatives or liberals or NDP or anybody in power, when a government's in power and people want to throw them out, people who are mad, who don't normally vote, who are engaged in the system.
00:10:01.180This is especially true in provincial elections.
00:10:02.740turn out and vote, you know, the people who vote one election in three or whatever.
00:10:08.440This election, they're, that strong, uh, uh, get rid of them feeling doesn't exist.
00:10:14.020And as a result, I think turnout is going to be lower.
00:10:17.220Now, Hamish, I know there was a lot of talk in the, I guess, 2019 election federally,
00:10:21.600which you're very familiar with, and even the past federal election in 2021, that Justin
00:10:26.740Trudeau had experienced a long five years, a long four years, however long it was, the
00:10:31.740idea that leaders are sort of wearing out their welcome and that the number of, say,
00:10:35.340scandals that the federal liberals had had was longer than you may typically have during
00:24:32.300I recently wrote a column about this phenomenon happening across North America.
00:24:36.240It's not just an Ontario thing where the Democrats, for instance, have a lot of problems with the fact that they are losing blue collar support.
00:25:04.480I think the difference is that there's a huge division in the union world now between the public sector and the private sector unions.
00:25:10.640And the private sector unions, a large chunk of working class voters and people typically represented by private sector unions are open to conservatives and often vote conservatives regardless of what their union bosses might tell them.
00:25:30.340Mike Harris always did very well with private sector union members, if he didn't, if not with their union leadership.
00:25:37.500So I think a couple of things are happening.
00:25:39.280One is that this government has done a huge amount of genuine outreach to the unions to make them feel heard.
00:25:46.360Whether they get everything they want or not is different, but they certainly don't make them feel antagonized.
00:25:50.820I think the premier has done a lot of that.
00:25:52.220I think Monty McNaughton, Minister of Labour, has done a phenomenal job at that and made it a priority and we're seeing a lot of the rewards from that.
00:26:07.260And I think the unions also recognize that their membership is genuinely significantly aligned with the Ford government anyway.
00:26:15.080So going against their membership too many times begins to cause problems for them, right?
00:26:21.160So it was a reasonably easy thing to do.
00:26:23.240The Ford government made it easy for them.
00:26:24.700Ford spent a lot of time courting them, obviously made it a focus of McNaughton's.
00:26:31.040Press Progress, which is the media funded by the Broadband Institute, which wrote a big piece complaining that actually the Ford government was actually really anti-worker and how dare they do certain things that hurt unions.
00:26:43.420And how dare they fund, you know, non-union projects as well.
00:27:04.040And then on top of that, the blow to the Liberals and NDP by really the decline of what used to be called the Working Families Coalition, you know, the tens of millions of dollars that unions spent in the elections against Tim Hudak or even against John Tory was a huge factor in the Liberal wins in the last couple of decades.
00:27:24.660And the Liberals didn't have to run the negative campaigns to demonize Conservative leaders because they had working families doing a lot of work for them.
00:27:41.280It collapsed because a lot of these private sector unions are saying, well, it's really not worth going to war with the Ford government.
00:27:46.240But also, you know, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:27:50.560You know, Del Duca and Horvath not looking like winners means, well, we're really going to spend all this money and confer all the ire of the government and then, you know, still probably lose.
00:28:02.860I don't know if that's something we really want to do.
00:28:11.980It's really difficult for me to point out the things that they are promising to do, like the marquee pledges, whether it's consistent with their previous brands or some newfangled thing.
00:28:22.020It's like, well, what do they want to do?
00:28:23.940I can think of how Stephen Del Duca says, okay, we've got to add COVID immunizations onto the mandatory public school attendance list.
00:28:30.240And you're like, okay, I don't know why you're still talking about this.
00:28:33.940They really, I think, wanted to still talk about COVID and they timed it so poorly because people are just done.
00:28:39.500I remember when the election first launched in, I guess, the first days of April, there were some campaign events that people were unmasked at them.
00:28:47.460There were candidates unmasked, I think, indoors.
00:28:50.840And then they were infighting each other on social media and Liberal versus NDP or even some people within the Liberal family or within the NDP family were critiquing their own candidates.
00:28:59.800I can't believe you risk, you know, killing all these seniors by going unmasked.
00:29:03.880And you're like, oh, my God, this is so embarrassing.
00:29:06.760Like, it was a total not ready for primetime.
00:29:09.020And I wonder to what degree they just thought they could campaign on all COVID all the time.
00:29:13.600Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways they've become sort of COVID fetishists, right?
00:29:16.660Where they think the market was that Doug Ford wasn't strong enough on COVID, despite, as you pointed out, having some of the longest lockdowns on the continent.
00:29:25.700And that's completely out of step where the majority of people in Ontario are.
00:29:31.540Majority of people in Ontario think the government probably did a decent job on COVID.
00:29:34.860And so this is just not a winning issue for them.
00:29:36.940But it became sort of talismanic and a fetish for these parties, especially these opposition parties on the left for the last two years.
00:30:37.260You know, like, that's fantastic, but not surprising at all, not news.
00:30:42.260And they, you know, really, really see, you know, so liberals do have that policy for them, that buck a ride policy, which I think is interesting and certainly cut through a little bit.
00:30:54.340And that's one of the reasons they pulled ahead of the NDP.
00:30:57.620Because I must credit voters that they are getting smarter in terms of they're like, yeah, it sounds nice, but how do you pay for it?
00:31:02.460It's like when Doug Ford scrapped the vehicle registration fee, which I support getting rid of it.
00:31:06.700But it was so obviously a vote-buying measure.
00:31:08.380I think a lot of people were like, oh, okay, cool, but like, I don't know, I know you're buying my vote, so whatever kind of thing.
00:31:13.720Yeah, I think, and this goes to the fundamental problem they have, right?
00:31:18.140What the liberals and NDP had one job on this election.
00:31:22.400Both of them had the same job, which was actually not to tear down Doug Ford.
00:31:26.140Their job was to become the anti-Doug Ford rallying cry, to be the one champion so that everybody on the progressive side of the ledger knows,
00:31:35.560if you don't like Doug Ford, you've got to vote for whether it's liberals or the NDP.
00:31:39.040That was their job, was to kill the other one, to push the other party down into somewhere into the low teens or middle teens or wherever,
00:31:46.620so that they could become, they could get themselves up into the mid-30s and fight for the government.
00:31:53.380And they've both singularly failed to do this.
00:31:56.160And we saw some squabbling, and it's funny, we've seen NDP, prominent NDPers, complaining that the liberals are attacking them.
00:32:03.900Oh, why are you attacking us? Are you attacking Doug Ford?
00:32:06.460No, like the strategy here has to be put the other one in the ground so you can be the anti-Doug Ford candidate.
00:32:12.860And they have both singularly failed to do that.
00:32:16.140Maybe that liberal policy of a buck a ride is designed to bring over soft NDP voters.